How is it then that my stock KUbuntu system won't let me allocate 50,000,000,000 bytes?

  $ uname -a
  Linux boxcar 7.0.0-31-generic #31~24.04.1-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Mon Aug 10 09:38:02 UTC 2 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
  $ cat tmp.c
  #include <stdio.h>
  #include <stdlib.h>
  
  int main() {
  char *s = malloc(50000000000ULL);
    if (s == NULL) {
      printf("Boo, hoo!\n");
    } else {
      printf("Look at all that memory!\n");
    }
    return 0;
  }
  $ cc tmp.c
  $ ./a.out
  Boo, hoo!

To get back to the essay, I can easily understand why someone who has Rust as their first-and-only systems language, and therefore expects abort-when-out-of-memory, will not immediately consider how C allows a different approach to how to handle that condition, but instead will try to replicate Rust's behavior in C.

"I can program FORTRAN in any language." :)